UCU Strikes Back

Once again, my university, along with 73 others in the UK, is on strike. We’re striking for #FourFights: 

1. Workload
2. Pay
3. Casualisation
4. Equality

To be clear, a lecturer’s salary is OK. You start at a bit over £30,000 and if you progress up the pay scale it rises to a median of £45,000 and up to £50,000+ for senior lecturers and readers (professors can make much more). That’s fine. But it’s not outrageously high either, given the minimum of 8 years’ training (more likely to be 10+ for most), and that pay scale means you’ll never go over that £50-something cap, despite a high degree of autonomy and responsibility. You can earn much more in the private sector. But we aren’t striking over the absolute amount; we are striking because we are paid much less (in real terms) for the same work than we were a decade ago. Unless you think we were grossly over-valued back then, this isn’t right. And more importantly, I (as a woman) am paid less than a similar man, and (as a white person) I’m paid more than a similar BAME person - and that’s not right. 

Worse than that, we are doing much more than we did a decade ago, for that reduced amount. Some of it is extra work that we might not mind doing per se. For instance, we all now take on much more outreach work than we ever did before, in the form of applicant days and talks in schools and media work and blogging and doing public events and so on. All this is great, and should be done. But we are doing it as well as everything we did before. Some of the extra work is increased pressure from metrics, rankings and assessment: we have to do extra things to make sure we score well in the National Student Survey, we have to apply for a certain number of research grants, and so on. And some of it is just that we are expected to handle much larger numbers of students with fewer staff (including fewer support staff, who are also under more workload pressure). My seminar groups can now contain up to 25 students. A decade ago it was maximum 15. This means an extra 40% marking (and marking takes a long time) and 40% more emails and appointments, not to mention the fact that students don’t get the benefits of small class sizes that seminars are supposed to mean. 

And remember that the salary quoted above applies to a lecturer on a full-time, open-ended contract. Many of us are on temporary, part-time contracts. This is the norm for people in their first few jobs, and it’s usually a few years at least before you get a full-time position that lasts more than a year or less. Some people work decades on part-time contracts. Many people are working more than one job, because it’s just a few hours of teaching here and there. And they aren’t paid for the long summer, because it’s teaching only, so they also need a summer job. They’ll likely be teaching new subjects for the first time every year, with short notice, which is much more work than regular, predictable teaching. Most people doing this kind of precarious work calculate their hourly rate to be around the minimum wage or less. When I was doing it, it was about £8 an hour. For some, it’s much less. Add to this the likelihood that you’ll have to travel much further (maybe hours) to get to that one hour of teaching, because you’ve had to look further to find work. You might take on a lot of pastoral work, because you’re ‘more approachable’ (you’re younger, or female, or BAME, or all three), and because you care deeply about your students, and this won’t be properly recognised in your pay, promotion or workload calculations. And you’re also constantly applying for the next job - this takes days each time, and don’t underestimate the stress of the instability and constant rejection. When I got my open-ended contract, it was like a weight was lifted from my shoulders. 

This all means that the ‘extra’ things are not going to get done, even for those lucky enough to be on a full-time, permanent contract. If you teach a new module, you’re going to use the previous person’s materials, not update it. If you teach a module for a few years in a row, you’re going to use the same slides again and not add in new scholarship or critically examine your reading lists. The people in positions of seniority are likely to be white men, so they won’t push you to prioritise equity and justice in your work, and they won’t reward you for doing so. For those on temporary contracts, you actually can’t do any of this work - you only know you’re teaching the module a week or two in advance, so there’s no time to order any new books or change much, and you can’t do it for the following year because you probably won’t teach that module again. So inequality remains unexamined and unchallenged, the whiteness of the curriculum is not addressed, and the quality of a university education is reduced. 

Address these issues, and students get a better education and better support, the university gets better ratings, staff have better mental health and can produce better work, and the institution becomes fairer. Literally no one loses.